Capitalism is itself transitory. It's not perpetual, and this is something that is no
minor matter. That capitalism, like slavery and feudalism and ancient tribal village
economies - it has a history. It's born. It evolves over time, and then it passes
away to be replaced by something else. That has happened to every other economic system,
and Marxism insists that it's going to happen to capitalism too. Marx is offering us a real
alternative. A concrete way to understand change beyond capitalism that offers us a better way,
which at a time of capitalism disappointing- and I'm being polite here- a growing number of people,
is no minor contribution. Let's see what it means. If surplus is produced by workers
and that's clear in slavery, feudalism and capitalism, in Marx's view,
then the real breakthrough, the real alternative is not another system that has a minority
appropriating the surplus into its hand that a majority produces. That was feudalism. That was
slavery, and that is capitalism. The real breakthrough, the real change, the way to
go beyond not just capitalism but all of such systems is to not allow that difference: not
to have a small group of people in the dominant position to direct and therefore take the surplus
from the mass of people that are working (the employees in capitalism). And the way to change
that is not to replace private individuals with government officials because that doesn't change
the basic relationship. It changes who occupies the position, but not what the position is.
The real breakthrough that Marx's argument shows us is if we make the workplace undivided: not
master/slave, not lord/serf, not employer/employee but to make it a community: a self-governing,
democratic community. Everybody has one vote and together we decide through debate and
then majority voting what we want to do in this workplace, what we want to produce, how we want to
do it, where we want to do it and what we want to do with the total output (the revenue) we get if
we sell it and so on. Make a community out of the workplace rather than a divided, tension-ridden,
master/slave, lord/serf, employer/employee. Make it a community. And by the way, this
word community: that's what the word communism initially meant for Marx. It had nothing to do
with the government. Had nothing to do with the state. It had to do with what he was focused on
which was reorganizing the core of production in a society: how the goods and services get organized
in terms of producing and distributing them, which for him became this question of how the surplus is
managed. A worker co-op, which is the name given in the United States and some other countries,
is for Marx the logical breakaway from capitalism, the way to cure capitalism's ills, the way to do
better than capitalism. So, let's review that. If you're a democrat with a small d,
you believe in democracy. Well, then Marx's argument ought to appeal to you
right off the bat because he's talking about effectively democratizing the enterprise,
democratizing the workplace. A commitment to democracy should never have exempted the workplace
from what democracy represents, and means, and offers us. Marx was very sophisticated.
He understood that every system had in it people who believed that that system would last forever.
Capitalism is not exceptional in that regard. Sure, a lot of people at various times
think that this system either has existed forever, or will, or both. There were people who
thought that about slavery, there were people who thought that about feudalism. They were all wrong.
That might make you at least begin to wonder about people who act like there's nothing else
but capitalism; that they may be blind to something. Marxism makes you aware of that.